We have had a very dramatic round of rebounds in world stock markets.

They started in Asia. Strong rebounds also in Europe, and here in the US.

The question is exactly what has driven it?

As you can see, the S&P 500 is now right back at the top of its range

since that dramatic correction in August. It hasn't broken through that range but it's right at the close of it.

You'll notice also that it never got below the level from the last very aggressive correction back in October of last year,

widely referred to as the bonds flash crash.

Now, what has been driving this?

Obviously, we had non-farm payrolls data on Friday, which was very disappointing.

Initially you saw a selloff and then you saw a rebound.

The most natural explanation would be that in this case bad news is good news, because it means that rates stay lower for longer.

However, various other asset classes don't fit with that.

We've seen bond yields rise today, not what happens if you think rates are staying lower for longer.

Commodities really haven't done very much, maybe up very slightly today, but not an impressive clear cut picture.

Then we get to the dollar, which should logically be weakened if people think that the Fed

really isn't gonna be raising rates any earlier than anybody else.

If we take a look at this next chart, you can see that actually the dollar hasn't done anything at all much against its major trading partners,

that's the US dollar index in blue. There includes currencies like the euro and the yuan.

Where you do see quite a dramatic rebound in the last few days is in emerging markets, foreign exchange,

at noticeably the the Brazilian Real and the South African Rand.

Those currencies had obviously been sold off very aggressively.

There was a suggestion that even if the news is very bad for emerging markets,

which it is, that sell off has gone too far and we've seen a very strong rebound from there.

This could simply be a response to oversold conditions and valuation.

Now you get a similar picture if you take a look at the guts of what has happened in the U.S. equity markets.

As we can see from the next chart. What we're looking at here are the two best-performing stocks today in the S&P 500,

which are Alcoa, the aluminum producer and Micron Technologies, which makes semiconductors.

Both very very cyclical stocks, very prone to the industrial, the global industrial cycle.

And both had done really really terribly for the year so far.

Now in the case of Micron, what is even more intriguing is that they have been spurred

by their latest earnings announcements, which came out after the market on Thursday.

Which was bad and disappointing and involves talking down estimates for the future,

but didn't talk down estimates quite as much as some brokers had feared.

The fact that you got that kind of a rebound from what was essentially a very bad, very negative earnings reports,

suggests that some of the fear that has been written into earnings forecast has been overdone

and that you could, we could indeed be primed to see quite a rebound

without that much in the way of good news from the earnings season once it gets underway.

When it comes to Alcoa of course they will be the first company to report later this week starting off that earnings season.

I do think the third-quarter earnings season really is now critical, if we want to see the S&P break up out of its range

that will require some reasonably good numbers from the earnings season.

It's still possible if companies choose to kitchen sink through lots of the bad data into their numbers

and to guide down when it's still possible that will take us back down again.

The bottom line is that earnings season really matters.